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Two very fine Late Romantic Italian string quartets. They are both highly listenable, and neither one is just another clone of the central European chamber music style. The performances are quite good. The second quartet is marginally more adventurous and interesting than the first. This purchase will be most rewarding for chamber music fans.more....

Published Reviews

By James M. KellerHigh Fidelity01-Nov-2010

Again we encounter Ms Rásonyi as first violinist and Mr Fenyö as cellist, here joined by second violinist György Albert and violist László Kolozsvári, their colleagues in the Lajtha Quartet. On the whole, I feel they make a better case for the quartets than they did for the Piano Trio, proving especially well attuned to the simmering nervousness of the Second Quartet.

Few though they
are, the principal chamber works of Ildebrando Pizzetti are among the most
important written in Italy this century: they certainly do not deserve
the general neglect that has descended upon them since the composer's death.
Two of his supreme contributions to the chamber repertoire, the powerful Violin
Sonata (1918-19) and the radiant Piano Trio (1925), have recently
been recorded on Marco Polo 8.223812. Together with the poignant Cello
Sonata (1921, written in memory of the composer's first wife), these
remarkable, in some ways quasi-operatic pieces marked the culmination of
Pizzetti's entire output as an instrumental composer.

If the three major
chamber works of 1918-25 date from what has reasonably been regarded as his
greatest period, the two string quartets recorded on the present disc belong,
respectively, to an earlier and a later phase of his long creative career. The Quartet
in A major, which is in fact his first, although Pizzetti himself never
called it that, is one of his earliest pieces that was in due course published:
it was written in 1906, when he was on the threshold of first making his name
as a composer in Italy. By the time he wrote the Quartet in D
in 1932-33 he had become something of an establishment figure in his homeland -
increasingly resented by the younger generation, who accused him (not
altogether without reason) of self-repetitive conservatism and dogged hostility
to the new. Listeners can make up their own minds about the justice or
otherwise of such accusations where the Second Quartet, as we may as
well call it, is concerned.

Although he was
still in his mid-twenties when he wrote the First Quartet, Pizzetti was already
becoming one of the most confidently creative Italian composers of his
generation. The work dates from the time when he was starting to collaborate
with Italy's most famous living poet and playwright
Gabriele d' Annunzio: it was the remarkable incidental music which he wrote in
1905-07 for D' Annunzio’s controversial new play La nave that first
brought him to widespread public notice in January 1908. Though completed
earlier than the La nave music, the First Quartet was not
performed unti11909, and had to, wait till 1920 before it was published in its
entirety. Yet, despite this relatively slow start, it can now be seen as one of
the most youthfully fresh and charming of all Pizzetti's early compositions.
Dating from several years before even his first published opera Fedra (1909-12),
it is naturally somewhat less operatic in approach than the three main chamber
works of 1918-25. Unlike the Violin Sonata, Cello Sonata and Piano
Trio, the quartet as a whole has no known extra- musical subject matter,
although one of the variations that make up its third movement bears the title Ninna
nanna per la mia piccina (Lullaby for my baby girl): the piccina in
question was the composer's eldest child Maria Teresa, who was born while the First
Quartet was a work in progress.

In all other
respects the quartet would appear to be purely abstract in conception, and it
is essentially traditional in structure. The first of its four movements is in
fairly standard classical sonata form, though the themes often contain modal
turns of phrase. For example, the main idea in the first subject, introduced by
the viola in bar 3, makes persistent use of D sharps rather than D naturals in
an A major context: it is, in other words, in the Lydian mode, and before long
there are also passing suggestions of Dorian F sharp minor and Mixolydian A
major. Some have seen the resultant fresh, rustic-sounding interweavings of
modal melodic phrases as reflecting Pizzetti's experience, in his youth, of the
folk-songs of his native province of Emilia,
some of which were themselves performed polyphonically. In later life, however,
as I can myself testify, he was in the habit of denying that he had ever been
influenced by folk music; and he was certainly never a systematic folk-song
collector in the way that Hoist and Vaughan Williams were in England or Bart6k and Kodaly were in Hungary.

Be that as it may,
the total effect of the first movement, with its combination of classical form
and modally-inflected lyrical material, is not so very far removed from that of
certain movements by Dvorak. Its overall sonata outline is clear and easy to
follow. The first subject-group unfolds quite expansively, and repeatedly gives
rise to flowing, flexible descending lines (mingling duple and triple rhythms) which
reveal that another strong and undoubted influence on Pizzetti's modal style
was that of Gregorian chant. The arrival of the second subject is marked by an
unobtrusive yet firm turn to E major, combined with the introduction for the
first time of quietly insistent dotted rhythms. In the last part of the
exposition section the key-sense becomes more fluid; but this is offset by the
fact that the development section begins with a brief return of the home key,
as the opening phrase of the first subject is softly restated by the viola and
cello in free canon.

The development
section as a whole follows classical precedents in passing through many keys
and in interweaving first and second subject material in more-or-less
traditional ways. The crucial return of A major at the beginning of the
recapitulation is again quiet but unmistakable, and here too the viola and
cello bring back the quartet's initial phrase in canon. This time the first
subject- group builds up a longer and more emphatic climax than it did in the
exposition, before giving place again to the second subject, now transposed
into the home key as one would expect. The movement ends with a short,
evocative coda pervaded by very free reminiscences of the main first-subject
idea, parts of which are now, as already at one point in the development
section, sometimes played in inversion and augmentation - upside down and in
longer notes than before.

The second
movement is a gentle, radiant song without words, in which modal inflections,
though not wholly absent, are less widespread than they were in the first
movement. The form is freely ternary, although in the middle section the main
melodic material is still fairly closely related to that of the first. The
arrival of the third section is marked by a decisive return of the movement's
home key of E major and of its opening melody, which is now, however,
reintroduced on the cello, passing back to the first violin four bars later,
and there are many other changes of detail. Here too there is a coda, in which
the central section is briefly recalled. Moreover, both at the end of the
middle section itself and in the coda Pizzetti makes fleeting back-references
to the initial phrase of the first movement's opening theme.

The third movement
begins with a simple, easy-going melody which forms the basis for four strongly
contrasted variations, mostly joined together by variant versions of a
recurrent cadenza-like linking passage. The first and third variations are fast
and dance-like, with vigorous fugal entries at the beginning of the third. The
exquisite second variation - muted, and with persistent drones at various
levels of the texture - is the above-mentioned Ninna nanna, which,
partly perhaps for personal reasons, Pizzetti chose to publish separately in
1911 in the Florentine periodical La Nuova Musica, nine years before the
whole work found its way into print. The last variation brings back phrases
from the theme in their original rhythm, but woven into a very different
texture in which the above-mentioned linking cadenza also plays a part.

The finale is
clearly related to the first movement, not only in general spirit but also in
its fairly frequent allusions to the quartet's opening theme, which are
inserted, perhaps slightly self-consciously, into a sonata structure whose
principal themes are nevertheless new. The movement's own first subject (again
mingling duple and triple rhythms) is presented by the first violin after a
brief, incisive introduction; the second subject is in due course launched by
the viola, in the relatively remote key of F major-minor, under rocking triplet
crotchets on the violins. As the movement unfolds, Pizzetti seems concerned to
put his technical ingenuity through its paces: the later part of the
development juxtaposes slower and faster versions of first subject material;
and in the recapitulation the second subject is combined with continuing
fragments of the first. A gentle last reference to the quartet's initial theme
is made by the cello just before the coda's forceful concluding restatement of
the finale's own opening flourish.

During the
twenty-six years which separated the composition of Pizzetti's Second
Quartet from that of his First, his inspiration reached its highest level
not only in the three important chamber works mentioned in the first paragraph
but also in the operas Fedra (1909-12) and Debora e Jaele (1915-21),
in the magnificent Messa di Requiem (1922-23) for unaccompanied chorus,
in some memorably beautiful, sometimes highly dramatic songs, and so on. Naturally
these intervening experiences had the effect of modifying his attitude to
inherited conventions considerably, and it is hardly surprising that the four
movements of the second quartet are less straightforwardly traditional in
structure than are those of its predecessor. Nevertheless the later work does
contain features which suggest a rapprochement with (and re-appraisal
of) various aspects of the great string quartets of the nineteenth century, not
excluding those of Beethoven; and Pizzetti no longer seems as inclined here to
write for the instruments in quasi-operatic terms as he was in his major
chamber compositions of 1918-25. Nor is there a known extra-musical programme
underlying this quartet, any more than there was in the First.

The unexpectedly
German-sounding chromatic intensity of the first movement's slow introduction
is established at once when the note-sequence D-E flat-D-F-E natural, on the
cello, is immediately imitated by the second violin playing A-B flat-A-C-B
natural. The fact that the last four of these notes are called B-A-C-H in
German terminology is unlikely to be a coincidence. Much of the introductory
section is based on various forms of this phrase at different pitches; however,
when faster music takes over in a passage marked Assai mosso ma non agitato,
the mood becomes more serene - embodied in a theme whose mingled triple and
duple rhythms again have a characteristically Pizzettian lilt. One might
suppose this to be the main first subject in a traditional sonata structure,
and a seeming second subject is in due course introduced by the viola, using
dotted rhythms. However, the subsequent course of events, both thematically and
tonally, is far from conventional: at the beginning of what might have become a
normal development section, a colourful new musical image is suddenly
introduced, with drum-like repeated notes on the cello answered by soft, solemn
horn-like calls on the second violin, and contrasting faster fanfares on the
first.

What ensues may at
times seem more like a tone-poem for string quartet than a purely abstract
piece: one may even be tempted to accept Guido M. Gatti's fanciful description
of some of this music, in his useful little book on Pizzetti, as suggesting
"a crowded hunt through forest and meadow, mysterious shady places and
sudden clearings open to the sun”, (An English version of Gatti's book was
published in London by Dennis Dobson in 1951.) As the first movement draws
towards its close, earlier themes, including that of the slow introduction, are
brought back, but not in the traditional order: the final return of the
supposed "first subject" , back in its original D major, does not
occur until the very end of the movement.

The slow second
movement is even harder to relate straightforwardly to traditional musical
structures, although clearly-defined recurrent themes do play their part in its
densely-woven, sometimes rather turgid texture. From time to time a gently
undulating quasi-Gregorian motif, first presented (unharmonized) by the second
violin and viola in octaves, seems to act as a kind of refrain. The end of the
movement reverts to a transformed version of its first idea, now imbued with a
new, noble radiance and superimposed, to begin with, on a long chord of F sharp
major.

The scherzo third
movement is arguably the best, and certainly the clearest and most succinct in
structure. Nothing could be more typical of Pizzetti's distinctive kind of
pastoral vivacity than the winsomely asymmetrical tune presented at the outset,
in Dorian B flat minor, by the first violin and cello in octaves. Here more
clearly than anywhere else one can sense, despite all the obvious differences,
that this is indeed the work of the same composer who wrote the First
Quartet a quarter of century earlier. A switch to a faster tempo introduces
an aptly contrasted "trio" section in which hunting-horns again seem
to be evoked; but when the movement's initial idea returns, it interacts with a
bitonally-clashing countermelody on the viola. In the whimsical coda, material
from the trio section returns but then digresses briefly into a more intense
and sustained manner, before abruptly rounding the movement off with a neat
"throw-away" gesture. The last movement begins rhetorically, with a
fierce, speeded-up version of the five-note pattern that dominated the
introduction to the first. This motif plays an even larger part in the finale
than it did in the earlier movement; but it alternates, rondo-like, with
various more relaxed and lyrical ideas. One of them returns at the very end,
freely adapted in broad, "hymnic" terms to end the work in a mood of
calm affirmation.

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